Madeira, on the Way to Italy 



771 



square mile. They have done it in one 

 way, and, I suppose, the only way pos- 

 sible, a few generations ago, but if today 

 this island were to be discovered anew, 

 absolutely without human inhabitants, as 

 it was originally, and it were left to 

 Americans to populate it, the problem 

 would be handled in quite another fash- 

 ion. 



By brute force and hand labor they 

 have tried to do it, and, though the 

 water-courses develop thousands of elec- 

 tric horse-power, they do not use it as 

 they could to run their mills nor to en- 

 circle the island with an electric rail- 

 way. They prefer that it shall cost more 

 to bring a load of timber from a few 

 miles in the interior than to bring it all 

 the way from Norwaj', and in this, per- 

 haps, they are no worse than Americans, 

 with their short-sighted policy of poor 

 country roads. But their terraces are 

 marvels of industry, and one stands 

 amazed before them as before the giant 

 ant-hills of Africa or the Indies. 



Little by little, just as the ant-hills are 

 made, these terraces are fastened to the 

 cliffs by a race of physically overworked 

 people, who are happy in a religion that 



keeps them in the grossest ignorance and 

 in those physical pleasures that are com- 

 mon to the savage and the civilized alike. 

 Instead of growing in intelligence, these 

 emigrants — hybrids of Moorish and Eu- 

 ropean immigration — have been forced 

 by the pressure of a hard day-by-day 

 struggle for mere food and fire to lower 

 and lower levels, until today they are on 

 a plane with some of the so-called savage 

 races, as far as their food habits are 

 concerned, though, of course, far above 

 these in their instinct of labor. The 

 island is now so overpopulated that the 

 young men are getting away to Hawaii 

 and the Argentine, where money is to be 

 made. In a sense, Madeira is becoming 

 an admirable place for the creation of 

 cheap but industrious field labor. In a 

 single steamer over i,cx)0 of these field 

 hands left for Hawaii to work in the 

 sugar es'-ates there. 



If there were adequate provision for 

 educating these peasant's sons, it would 

 be hard to find conditions more likely to 

 instill into them the instinct of industry 

 and at the same time develop good, strong 

 bodies than those furnished by the simple 

 mountain life of the peasant of Madeira. 



A SIMPLE METHOD OF PROVING THAT 

 THE EARTH IS ROUND 



By Robert Marshall Brown 



State Normal School, Worcester, Massachusetts 



M attention was directed a year 

 or so ago by Prof. W. M. Davis 

 to certain experiments on the 

 curvature of the earth performed by Mr 

 H. Yule Oldham, of King's College, 

 Cambridge, England, on the old "Bed- 

 ford Level." It was suggested to me at 

 the time that Lake Ouinsigamond oftered 

 exceptional advantages for the repetition 

 of these experiments. I have not been 

 able to find Mr Oldham's report on his 

 experiments, and such references to them 



as I have seen have not furnished me 

 with any idea of the methods pursued by 

 him. In one sense, then, my experiment 

 is not a repetition. The object was the 

 same, the methods were in the main sim- 

 ilar, but the apparatus probably dififered. 

 Nearly every one is familiar with the 

 proof of earth sphericity deduced from 

 the disappearance of a ship at sea. This 

 proof, in part because of its submittance 

 to simple diagrammatic representation on 

 a blackboard or on paper and the sim- 



